


Hubris

by graiai



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alien Gender/Sexuality, Blood Kink, Meaningless Consent, Multi, Political Machinations Disguised As Pornography, Size Difference, Virginity Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:27:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27907456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graiai/pseuds/graiai
Summary: “What has the Emissary told you of this process?” Igeyorhm asks the youth; Lahabrea is perhaps the only person who knows her well enough to recognize the note of disdain in her simple, distinct speech.
Relationships: Elidibus/Igeyorhm/Lahabrea, Igeyorhm/Lahabrea (Final Fantasy XIV)
Kudos: 8
Collections: Consent Issues Exchange 2020





	Hubris

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fetters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fetters/gifts).



> > Hubris consists in causing injury or annoyance whereby the sufferer is disgraced, not to obtain any other advantage for oneself besides the performance of the act, but for one's own pleasure; for retaliation is not insult, but punishment. The cause of the pleasure felt by those [who commit hubris] is the idea that, in ill-treating others, they are more fully showing superiority.
> 
> — Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_

“What has the Emissary told you of this process?” Igeyorhm asks the youth; Lahabrea is perhaps the only person who knows her well enough to recognize the note of disdain in her simple, distinct speech.

Certainly the child cannot: earnestly does he crane his neck to meet her level gaze and reply, “The Speaker will examine my intentions to confirm I bring no selfish motivations to the seat of the Emissary. I was told it was mainly a formality.” That much is correct, though to an extent the child cannot know. It is rare enough any appointed successor has impure enough motives to be unworthy of their seat, and rarer still that these might go unnoticed until their communion with the Speaker; having created the Emissary’s succedent himself with too little sense of self to be _selfish_ , Lahabrea does not so much as plan to examine them.

The child hesitates in the ensuing silence, sparing a brief glance towards Lahabrea before fixing his eyes upon Igeyorhm once again. “And that it can be… overwhelming.”

“Perfect,” the Speaker says when again silence falls, the would-be Emissary finding nothing more to add in answer. And perfect it is, of all the possibilities he and Igeyorhm had discussed between themselves: there is no limit to what they may do, when all they mean to test is an ability to follow orders, and of those present only they could guess their methods are... unorthodox. “We needn’t waste time on explanations, then. Do you require any time to prepare yourself?”

“No,” and then in a voice which carries more firmly, “No. I am prepared. I swear it.”

“Very good,” answers Lahabrea. The traditional rites, once consented to and begun, are not interrupted for any cause, let alone the candidate’s own doubts; to waver would be to indicate a strength of will unfit for such demands as rule will place. Lahabrea frankly doubts the figure which stands before him has enough of a mind to change it, comprised of so little aether to stand not one-third the height of his brethren on the Convocation, those whom the red mask the child will soon be led to take up marks as his peers, for all he shares no other unifying characteristic.

“As a member of the Convocation,” Lahabrea lectures, his cadence that of an orator, “and in particular in taking the seat of the Emissary, a voice amid our esteemed number for the white-masked masses, you must come to make your decisions with all the star in mind. Indeed, taking in mind all _experiences_ , and not simply those of us few in Amaurot. Thus, before donning your citizen’s robes—for even in white, yours shall be as plain as any other’s, as we do not stand above our people but among them—it is necessary for you to know embodiment. Vulgar it may be, but we are ourselves in the minority upon this star for our apotheosis, do you see?”

“Have you ever taken on a body before?” asks Igeyorhm, and the child startles out of his nod of affirmation, as if forgetting her presence.

“Yes.”

Lahabrea inclines his head in mild surprise. “For what purpose?”

“The piano. My teacher has shown me how to play.”

“Then take that form, please,” Igeyorhm continues without hesitation, and for the display offered them she must stifle her laugh as Lahabrea does, though there is not unkindness in her tone. The figure before them is an embodiment truly for a sole purpose, though not the one the prior Emissary’s detractors whispered about: hands and shoulders fully articulated, and a face upon which his mask rests. Capable, certainly, for reading visualized music and recreating it in the form of sound—but not for the supposed pleasures of the flesh.

Igeyorhm kneels, taking small hands in the spectre of her own, much larger. “That’s very good, but let’s try something different, shall we?” Lahabrea can hear her bemusement, as when she herself has taken on a body and made the mouth from which it speaks turn upwards at its edges into a smile. “Something a bit more… complete.”

For all his grandstanding—as likely to be recognized as such by the child as is Igeyorhm’s condescension—Lahabrea himself has never taken upon a body. Such was not required of him in his own confirmation, nor indeed would it be of anyone. This is merely a whim of Igeyorhm’s, who had decided it preferable to watch rather than the merging of souls which in all other cases comprises one’s ascension to their title. She has labored to explain aesthetics to her lover time and again, elaborating colorfully upon the beauty she finds in physicality, in soft hair and slender limbs, so much so Lahabrea can fairly _feel_ the impression of such a form in his mind’s eye when, however temporarily, they two become one.

He sees a likeness now before him, Igeyorhm guiding the child into a composite of her own desires, which features and curves ever hold her fascination: all that which she most dearly wishes Lahabrea to touch. She weaves what she can of the child’s pool of aether; shallow though it is, Lahabrea refrains from gathering any more, content to observe his lover at work and knowing better than to interfere besides. Being far more talented in transmutation than creation, Igeyorhm cannot shape so little of a soul into a being on their own scale, but the care with which she forges delicate limbs—with such fine details as to be imperceptible to all but he who created the aether she now shapes—is nothing short of art.

Her masterpiece complete, Igeyorhm presents it to Lahabrea with a flourish, the pride she takes in her work shining bright in her aether. “What do you think?” she asks, spectral hand engulfing that small shoulder—when Lahabrea murmurs his approval, that hand falls first to caress the child’s side then to tug his black robes off over his head, careful of the white mask which is the Speaker’s to replace, just as any other.

“Let’s see you,” Igeyorhm tells the child, tucking a loose strand of his white hair behind his ear—what of it is long enough at the front to catch. Her hands then fall to his own, turning them palm-up, inspecting the way new-made knuckles curl and the blunt tips of his tiny fingers. “This is very good work,” she says—though Lahabrea is as aware as she it can only be her own work she is praising. “Now open your mouth,” she orders, and the youth acquiesces. Igeyorhm thumbs his dark lips, revealing beneath them perfect, useless teeth. Truly she has outdone herself, for Lahabrea can see even the fine ridges upon the chewing surfaces, as if the child’s body would ever come to another purpose but this. The fingers Igeyorhm now presses past his tongue make him choke, and when she removes them he shies away from the light touch she offers between his shoulderblades.

“Keep still,” Lahabrea chides the youth. “Any member of the Convocation worthy of his seat must be _resolved_ , above all else. Do your predecessor proud.”

His response is awarded not with any verbal _yes sir_ but the sentiment comes through all the same in the way the youth straightens his back under Igeyorhm’s phantasm of a touch. She brings her hand down the length of his spine, then curls her fingers between his legs, the width of even the three of them forcing him to widen his stance.

At this facsimile of touch, soft between his thighs, the child gasps, and it is impossible to tell how much of his response is the novelty and how much is the chill. Still disembodied, her aetheric ‘fingers’ feel must feel so—at times, she’s bid Lahabrea explore her in an embodied form, and when it invariably shivered, she had explained that he felt cold against her skin. Now, Igeyorhm cups their little experiment’s soft cock in her palm, a few perfunctory motions all that’s required to see he will be able to grow hard if they desire it of him. Behind his cock lie lips which look as though they enclose a cunt—so it was in certain favorite forms of Igeyorhm, that she would lie with her legs apart so that Lahabrea might see how even a body well-defined would engulf its own fingers—but held tight enough it’s unclear until Igeyorhm’s fingers part them if indeed it does.

At this invasion, the youth flinches, but he has learned from Lahabrea’s earlier chastising: unbidden, he says, “I apologize for my reticence. I know I must see this through.”

“Then we shall continue,” Lahabrea says, and rewards his resolve by joining him in embodiment, aether becoming flesh that resembles none so much as Ifrita, the concept which has captured so much of his time of late, and with it Igeyorhm’s fascination. She has created for the child a body fitting for the Emissary, balanced in all respects, with the dark features and slight silhouette which most draw Lahabrea’s gaze—it is only right to return her the favor, and cater to her own tastes.

Igeyorhm rises from kneeling beside the youth, but before returning to her place as observer, she offers him another opportunity to demonstrate his allegiance: “Are you ready?”

And he, bare but for the plain white mask soon to be parted from him, standing before a half-monstrous figure which fairly looms, hesitates, and does not answer.

“Your teacher—the one you knew as Elidibus—has already stepped down. You were taught how resolutions are met within the Convocation?” Lahabrea prompts, receiving a nod. “Then you will understand that I will not be able to call for a vote on any matter until you have undergone your appointment—or we must find another, if you are unable. It would be a shame, don’t you agree?” he asks Igeyorhm, and does not wait for a reply, for she knows it is but a rhetorical point: “And it is rare to find one so well-suited to the role of Emissary, arguably the most influential of our number.” Even by Emet-Selch’s oppressive standards does Lahabrea speak the truth—if not the entirety of it—little as those will matter, when they conclude this bit of theater and present Elidibus, the Emissary.

Lahabrea reaches out to place an embodied hand upon the child’s cheek, and he does not flinch away from it. “I—I have a duty to our people.”

“You do. Elidibus must be prepared to do all that is necessary in order to secure the safety and comfort of this star, no matter the price. Now—are you Elidibus?”

The youth breaks from his gaze for the first time, but only briefly. Resolving himself, he looks once more to the Speaker, his creator, and says, “Yes. I will be Elidibus, or I will be nothing.”

Lahabrea reaches out an unfamiliar hand to grasp the plain white mask which had marked him as one of the masses, unmistakably _of Amaurot_ despite his incompletion, and remove it. The first expression to cross the child’s bare face is a passing expression of fear; his resolve demonstrated in his posture when he has not yet learned how to control the expressions of uncovered eyes. “So you will.”

For the vote to install the Emissary as the heart of Zodiark was complete, with fourteen in favor as do all measures require by law—only for the precedent to relinquish the seat. It is any member’s sole authority, and in fact obligation, to select a successor, and so Elidibus had: a soul of Lahabrea’s own making, and a child in the short-seeing eyes of Emet-Selch. The purity of his intentions Lahabrea has no doubt, but still he must be dealt with; left unchecked, the rigid moral code by which he abides would damn all the world for its absolutism.

But as their world nears its apparent end, already has there been talk among the Convocation and the populace both to allow sessions to be called and measures passed with merely three-fourths or even two-thirds of their membership in agreement. As Speaker, Lahabrea has ensured all that remains is to secure a unanimous vote, as has been the custom throughout living memory, to allow it—and the child, so small beneath Lahabrea’s hands, so easily sculpted or shattered, shall sound the death knell.

For Emet-Selch has already agreed that they mustn’t be beholden to Azem’s whim to appear, let alone should any one of their number return to the Lifestream without appointing a successor, whether killed or in protest. Were he as ruthless as his seat ought to demand, he would force Lahabrea to show his hand by staging such a protest himself. Instead he insists all loss of life is wrong, be it a half-finished soul or his very own—and so, lacking any other means to prevent what he has so impassionately called a _child_ from sitting upon a body tasked with naught less than the salvation of the star, and who upon it shall survive or perish, will he absolve himself of responsibility at the irrevocable cost of his own franchise. It is laughably easy to manipulate the closed-minded, given the proper tools.

And what a fine tool they have made for themselves, he and they who were until so recently the Emissary, aether gleaming ever so replete with his purpose it matters not that he lacks most of what encompasses that fraught description of ‘personhood’: he and his duty are one and the same, that devotion giving him more strength of will than all but the rarest of individuals, and in the same breath ensuring he will do all Lahabrea requests of him, if only he calls it an obligation. His hands upon the youth’s bare skin, Lahabrea looks to Igeyorhm for direction—as in all things relating to the flesh, she is more experienced than he in this.

“He’s small,” she says, “and penetration is hardly the point here. Put your cock between his thighs.”

This act, Lahabrea has neither seen nor taken part in, but he supposes he can intuit the mechanics of such a thing, and how it could be pleasurable: the friction of warm thighs clenched tight around an organ Lahabrea knows to be quite sensitive. Glad to let Igeyorhm choreograph what she longs to watch, Lahabrea wraps his hands around the child’s bare thighs to facilitate positioning him. So small is the gasping thing that Lahabrea’s fingers wrap all the way around his limbs with ease. Had Igeyorhm seemed so much larger when it was she who had been touching him? Lahabrea found he could see in his mind’s eye only his lover, and the barest impression of the body she had crafted for him.

“What _is_ the point?” the child asks as he is brought close before the kneeling Lahabrea, and with a hand upon his shoulder turned to face away from him.

Lahabrea sighs, long and slow. “Were you not paying attention when I explained to you the purpose of the rites? You must come to know embodiment—know it in all its senses. As Emissary, you must have felt pain, and pleasure, and fear… all those base emotions which rule those with whom we Amaurotines share our star.” All lies, but remarkably convincing ones. He does not wait for the youth beneath him to acknowledge his understanding, only returns to his examination of the odd little thing he’s meant to be fucking. Truly, is not the most pure expression of love doing the utterly ridiculous for one’s soulmate?

Lahabrea presses several fingers between the child’s legs to adjudge the ease with which he might take his thighs, and in so doing drags his thumbnail between the soft lips of his cunt, slipping unintentionally between them to find a tight channel which most certainly could not offer ingress. “Ah, Igeyorhm—as ever, I see clearly the wisdom in your direction.”

On those occasions Igeyorhm bids Lahabrea watch her as she now watches the two of them, taking a body to play with at her leisure, whenever the form she has taken on bears a resemblance to the body beneath him now, rarely does she enter it with her own hand without first working at some length to lessen the tension—with the child so intent to perform his role, holding the body that is now his rigidly straight, it seems unlikely that tension will find release, and Lahabrea’s fingers are a great deal larger than his own besides.

So Lahabrea slips his thumb free of the youth’s cunt and with his other hand guides the length of his cock between his thighs. “Keep your legs held tightly together,” he orders, and has no doubt the would-be Elidibus shall obey, even when the hard ridges on the length of his—Ifrita’s—cock drag welts into soft skin and the way the head of it catches on that first press scratches him roughly enough to draw blood. Lahabrea does not lean over the child’s body but simply holds him steady by the hips, so as not to obstruct Igeyorhm’s view of the proceedings. “I know it is overwhelming,” Lahabrea assures—his own confirmation had been, if solely for the weight of the duty with which he was entrusted—“but you need only endure it once.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Igeyorhm says, with an affected levity to the voice she projects. “A false hope is crueler than a painful truth, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?” Lahabrea asks plainly.

“We live in interesting times… Who's to say the rites of the Emissary won't grow weak as all the rest of reality does? And our Elidibus is _unique_ , at that.”

The child with no small difficulty asks, “...I am?” and the chords of it sound as small and confused as that aether which escapes his conscious control.

“It’s not meant to be an insult, dear,” Igeyorhm says, full well in the knowledge of their peers’ opinions of individualism. “You were made to be singular. Know you how the Emissary alone is robed in white? That he should be one of a kind is a credit to his title.”

Without so much as pausing for the soft little _oh_ heard between them, she turns her attention to Lahabrea. Ever-so-pleased and with unnameable fondness, she declares, “He’s perfect,” using those frequencies which, to any true peer, would conceal none of their meaning—and which to Lahabrea contain the unmistakable strains of her arousal.

“There are none better for the role,” he agrees with a misplaced truth—for there has never, and can never, be one more suited than this, made by the Speaker’s own hand for no other purpose. “Should the rite need to be repeated, would you see to keeping it between the three of us? Simply to save your colleagues some unnecessary worry.” And no doubt several meetings droning on over debates already settled, or else so self-evident as to be unnecessary tedium.

“Of course,” is the answer, coming at once, and Lahabrea allows himself a satisfaction that Igeyorhm will not mistake, surpassing entirely the limitations of body to which he has confined himself. “It is no less than my duty.”

Lahabrea sees fit to finish the statement for him. “And little enough to endure for the fate of the world.” He is not being violent, as such, but the child is so delicate that his thighs have been rubbed red with blood from Ifrita’s rough cock, and he shakes with the effort of holding his thighs together. No doubt it hurts—that their little Elidibus-elect would without hesitation obey an order over acting in self-preservation Lahabrea had already known, but it is a heady feeling to see it proven.

“It’s supposed to feel like this?”

Lahabrea has never had a cock fucking between his own embodied thighs, and having neglected to pan the child’s soul as he would have in any traditional confirmation, Lahabrea is ignorant of his sensory experience. But the thighs of so many forms are sensitive to touch and to warmth, and Igeyorhm has ever been vocal in her enjoyment of like activities. “Yes,” he answers, and if he is wrong the child will never learn it. He is too innocent to ask his teacher, as it seems his teacher has not already educated him in such matters, and in all likelihood will not be long enough for this world to learn so elsewhere.

For when next they convene, should no other propose it, Emet-Selch’s hazard of a moral code will require him to bring forward a motion to allow for a supermajority vote himself—and all because to require unanimity is to force the child Elidibus to choose who gets to live. If he believes such a decision no one truly has the right to make, he will not suffer an innocent to even hear of such. And thus in his predictability Emet-Selch, ever-present thorn in the Speaker’s side, will hand Lahabrea the Convocation to do with as he and his own please—and with it will Lahabrea do what he must for the sake of their very survival.

With any soul-searching wholly unnecessary, his own completion (the first he’s ever had in a body, spend—so very odd—on the child’s thighs and on the floor beneath them) may serve as their augury, “And with that does the seat of Elidibus lie before you.”

Disentangling himself from the youth, Lahabrea finds no small amount of disgust at the strands of spend which still hang from his spent and bloodied cock, but ignores the indignity for now to create from naught but his vision the red mask which belongs to the seat of Elidibus, a scale model for their diminutive Emissary.

Finding the child’s blood upon several of his fingers as well, Lahabrea pinches the mask between forefinger and thumb to leave this, the symbol of his esteem, free of the stain of bodily fluids. As he places the mask upon his bare face, his remaining fingers smear the child’s—Elidibus’ own blood across his cheek and lips, and pressing without intention into his open, gasping mouth. “With you at our side, Elidibus, none among the Convocation will stand in our way.”

“None _anywhere,_ ” Igeyorhm corrects. Her spectral hand finds Lahabrea’s, cold to the touch, but she does not interweave their fingers as is most often her wont. Instead, she leads his hand between the Emissary’s scraped thighs, murmuring, “Now finish what you started.”

Certainly Emet-Selch will come to regret his vote, but his emotions are neither here nor there; never again shall Lahabrea be beholden to his particular _principles_. What Lahabrea can not under any circumstance take from him—his vote, and the absolute power he wields by withholding it—he will place in Lahabrea’s hand, sure as Lahabrea has taken the half-soul now called Elidibus into it. Soon, the god they have made shall flow through him and, empowered by the desperation of their people, rewrite the very laws of creation according to Lahabrea’s own wisdom—and then this star and everything on it shall be theirs.

Lahabrea raises his voice in promise to Igeyorhm, over the gasps of Elidibus below him, shuddering in a motion so unnatural as to be only the reflex of his body worked into orgasm by his creator’s touch: “None anywhere—very, very soon.”


End file.
